Where do birds go after they leave my feeder?

Here's a question for Ask Old Stu: There are six goldfinches on my bird feeder right now. When they are not on my bird feeder, I never see them. Where do they go?

This was a challenging question, because as I began to research it, I realized that your feeder is like 1,000 miles away from me. As my research budget is currently somewhat limited, I was forced to speculate, rather than verify with visual proof.

Once they leave your feeder you would no longer see them if you continued to look at the feeder, so it is very important to look for them at other places besides the feeder. I would suggest you begin looking for them at your neighbor's feeder. Birds such as goldfinches require enormous amounts of food, and they will often eat ninety-two pounds of food a day, or something like that. I'm not exactly sure, but they will leave one feeder, and travel to the next. You can prove this by placing another feeder 2 feet - 3 inches from the existing feeder, and watch the birds go from one to the other, over and over. If you add enough feeders (minimum 422), they will never leave, except for the instances described below.

One must determine first why they left in the first place. Perhaps a cat was approaching, and they simply flew to a safer place for the time being. Another option would be that they needed a drink to waRsh (that's the way I pronounce it) down the food. Songbirds will often fly a distance much farther than all shorter distances, just to get a drink of water. They especially like regular water more than the heavy water used to produce nuclear fuels, because the heavy water is heavier. That is why there were so few goldfinches in Norway, during WWII.

If the bird happened to leave your feeder to die, they will fly to a place on the ground which offers cover where they can hide until they leave this world -- and then they are gone. The birds may have left your feeder because of bad weather. During a rain storm, you can find them hiding under any sort of shelter -- usually about 2/3 up a tree, under crossing branches or thick leaf cover.

One final though is that your birds just got ticked off at the same old feed stuff, and they left to actually forage for healthier foods (worms, bugs, seeds, stale chewing gum stuck to the sidewalk at WalMart, or perhaps they will feed on those dying birds hiding under ground cover. Despite they attractive appearance, goldfinches are actually vicious creatures and will often take on a puma. One theory is it was a common goldfinch that caused the death or the woolly mammoths.